Saturday, 22 February 2020

Xinu of Moh

(Or MohXin)

Mighty and wise are the Xinu, guardians of the cold and
wall-bound land of Moh. Grey and huge as the Hama of Hroch, horned are they,
and armour-skinned.

Hideous and beneficent is Moh, the Iron Crab whose colour
is rust and whose virtue is Love. For Moh loves all as he, or it, scuttles
sidewise and gigantic over Yggsrathaals waste-pack; a terrible, weird
discomforting love.

Honest are the Xiunu, sometimes brutally direct.
Altruistic are they, but cold, mathematical and precise. In some ways outside
the spirit of the great Zoiterran meta-civilisation, though still better than
Qua, for though they are strange, they follow Mohs high Virtue of Love

Love, by its nature, must be given freely to all, for
love that knows partiality or prejudice, is not truly Love, but mere
transaction. Partiality, preference, distinction, these things guarantee that
love cannot be unconditionally bestowed. They are sins against Moh. Therefore
there must be equality between all, and that equality must be ABSOLUTE.

Absolute equality requires absolute authority to ensure
its survival, else it would be swept away, though that authority can be wielded
by no particular party or group, but only by all, for the good of all.

Science And Pacifism

The Xinu, alone of all Zoiterran cultures (except perhaps
the insanely Fascist Krote of Tan-Te), make systemic and focused use of that
most un-Zoiterran philosophy - Experimental Natural Science. Nowhere in
Zoiterra is technology more advanced, and nowhere are science and mathematics
more widely understood.

Due to their large hands and stubby fingers, the Xinu
have become expert at building and wielding fine manipulation devices which
allow them to work at the smallest scale. With these, they often wear
magnifying lenses. Xinu close-work glasses are more like mad face telescopes
than anything else, these goggly apparatus use the horn as a bracing point and
extend down the length of the snout like a projection of tears frozen in time.

The Xinu "Universal Schools" produce experts in
mathematics, metalwork, engineering and logistics. They have discovered steel,
have produced engines driven by steam and coal and have even experimented with
electrical power. The Xinu's central city; "One", is lit at night by
flickering irregular amber lights produced by the transmission of an invisible
energy.

But resources are lacking. Zoiterra is not rich in metal,
or coal, and the Xinu are loath to systemically harvest the shell of Moh, who
is sacred to them.

If metal, or an outcropping suggesting it, is sighted out
in the Waste-Pack, then the Xinu are the first to respond, and in greatest
force. They surge out from Moh in Waste-Engines - huge black iron castles,
smoking battleship tank-arks that journey over the Waste like icebreakers or
fortified sleds. There they dive upon any potential metal ores, blasting away
any Orc or Monkeyman attacks with jezzails, pneumatic machineguns and
rapid-fire artillery, mining and harvesting what they can with the aid of
clockwork mono-purpose golems, before racing back to Moh with their spoil,
hopefully before the Great Race of Beasts leaves them behind.

These are the only occasions when the Xinu will essay
forth from Moh, en-masse, with aggressive intent, and they regret them deeply.

For theXinu are culturally non-aggressive. Not quite
Pacifists, for the majority are willing to use force to defend the innocent.
But defence only. The Xinu will assist any culture suffering an unprovoked
attack, but they aim to never attack themselves.

In the past, Xinu Legions have turned around and changed
sides mid-fight on receipt of new historical information about the origins of a
conflict. (To them it very much does matter "who started it"). Only
to change sides again once an even deeper analysis of the conflicts history is
presented.

The Xinu are masters of siege craft, fortification and
artillery. The injection of Xinu siege masters into a defensive force can
massively increase the time and effort it takes to defeat them, and the arrival
of an entire Xinu 'Peace Legion', backed up by (non-lethal) logistical golems,
Waste-Engines and spotter birds, can potentially stop any attacking force
dead-on.

This makes the price of an aggressive war far too steep
for most Zoiterran cultures to manage, which is exactly what the Xinu intend.

The Environment Of Moh

The Iron Commonwealth is not a verdant land. A huge
arching plain speckled with low, rolling hills, pine, temperate forests and the
jags of tiny mountains capped with rust red where the ferrous shell of Moh
bursts through. Around the rim of Moh runs the Great Waste Wall, the largest
single structure in Zoiterra.

The Great Waste Wall is constructed from pieces of the
Waste Pack itself. Though the Nation Beasts can crash through it like Ice, to
beings of normal scale, it may as well be stone. Over generations, the Xinu
have hauled up fragments of it, cut them down and worked them into place,
sometimes using mortar produced with ultrafluid from the chaos sea itself.

Within the wall are great untenanted areas. But no area
is unmarked. Mapping pillars of stone and iron are driven into the earth in a
regular grid, the logic of an abstract map built into the land itself. Roads
and keep-towns on Moh are built map co-ordinates and navigation happens by
number.

A land of forms more than shapes, Moh is cold, covered by
winds and freezing fast-flowing streams. Rust hills, dark moors, grey-white
keep-cities, right-angled roads, the parralax of marker-stones, the distant
sounds of thundering mills or synchronised chants. The iron mountains of the
crab are cut with shallow valleys sliced into carefully maintained stepped
sides.

Moh is one of few nations where it can be guaranteed that
there are no wild hordes of Monkeymen or other Waste incursions hiding
somewhere in the interior, and no bandits, monsters or rogue states. The only
danger a traveller on Moh must face is cold and Xinu society itself.

Xinu Society

Nothing more perfectly encapsulates the nature of Xinu
society than the always repeated shape and layout of their fortress-towns.

Every settlement, of whatever size, is a star-fort,
walled and barred, a defensive fall-back in case anything should penetrate the
Great Wall. Within their star-shaped layout, Xinu settlements are based around
large, single-storied terraced homes on radial gridwork streets, all equally
sized. Towards the centre are factories, manufactories and allotments, and in
the middle are queues, clacking, ticking, the rattle of lottery balls, bins of
ticket stubs, pigeon shit, pigeon coops, bells, the tapping of flashing signal
lights, the murmuring of vote-counters, huge shuffling feet waiting with
discipline and the three cornerstones of Xinu civilisation, the Keep, the
Universal School and the Lottery Hall.

The Keep

Every citizen of Moh is a conscript in the Great
Defensive Army of Moh and must perform compulsory service, after which point
they maintain a rank as either a reservist or a full-time member of the
military.

The Keep is the tallest and most fortified building of
any Xinu settlement. Usually built of waste-pack stone fortified with iron
bolts, and topped with clacking semaphore hands and a signal tower in contact
with a relay station somewhere within view, the keep is the central organising
node of the settlements defence, its point of final fall-back and the nexus of
its military communications with the rest of Moh.

The Universal School

To most Zoiterrans a Xinu Universal School would seem
like a staggeringly vast complex with secure areas resembling a prison, higher
areas like an institute of theoretical research crossed with a very refined
rabbinical study group and in-between, places that seemed like a university or
primary school.

At the peak of the Universal School are always the Bells
which ring out continually to remind all its scholars of the passing of various
periods and events.

The reason the Xinu schools seem partially like prisons
is because for the Xinu, no-one is ever "in prison", they are simply
being educated, or re-educated. Though unfortunately, some people have to be
re-educated so much they become unresponsive and in fact die.

Every Xinu is in the process of education until they
become a full citizen. After that, they often continue into further education
in some specialism, or end up being re-educated, should they fail Mohs virtue
in some significant way. There is no "punishment" in Xinu culture,
only differing intensities of required re-education. Likewise, there is no
hierarchy in Xinu culture, everyone is simply a citizen of exactly the same
rank as everyone else, doing the best they can for Moh with whatever abilities
they have.

But there is a darker, invisible and inverse
anti-hierarchy which counts the number of times an individual has had to be
re-educated to the point of citizenship. Obviously, the lower the number the
better, unless the number is too low for your age, which is considered a little
"too" perfect.

Those who systemically fail to be re-educated face
voluntary emigration to the Claws, or even expulsion.

Educating The Other

In compliance with Mohs virtue, Xinu citizenship is open
to absolutely any sophont capable of communication presenting itself at the
Waste Wall Portals or the embassy in Claw City.

A very small number of other Zoiterran peoples do apply
for citizenship and pass, and are accepted on Moh exactly as if they were Xinu.
Moh even has educated, citizen monkeymen, something impossible and
mind-boggling to the rest of Zoiterra, and one of the largest concentrations of
"free krote" outside Tan-Te.

The exchange is perhaps a fair one. The silent, but
crushing and unending high standard of behaviour required for everyone is paid
back with full and unquestioned equality, regardless of shape or form. All that
matters is how you behave.

The Lottery Hall

This is a huge chamber, like a sacred bingo hall, full of
queues, voting booth, ticket stubs, calm scratching and counting. Referenda are
always taking place so the queues in the Lottery Hall are truly eternal,
changing only in what they are queuing for. If the purpose of a Queue changes
while a Xinu is still in it, they will usually keep waiting and instead vote on
whichever issue is presented to them at the end.

Xinu Government

The Civil Service performs almost all administrative
functions and is elected by random lottery from among citizens for fixed terms.

There is no Xinu Senate or Parliament, that might lead to
parties. Instead there are the Referenda, which are continual. Laws say there
can be no more than one referenda per-day and have limited the complexity of
the question matrix after centuries of inflation lead to the vote sheets being
many pages long with branching path decision structures and preferred choice
hierarchies.

Anything than can be dealt with by the Civil Service, is.
Anything requiring a higher authority is tabled for a referendum. For those
rare and difficult times when a complex decision is required, at high-speed,
and the hierarchies of Military or Universal School are not sufficient, the
Xinu will submit to the shameful stop-gap of a Temporary Executive Committee.

This committee is chosen by rapid hand-lottery from among
the immediately available members of the civil service and makes whatever
decisions are required. Later, its choices are retroactively cleared or condemned
by polling the whole civil service, or by a referendum. Everyone who has ever
served on a Temporary Executive Committee is deeply ashamed of doing so - as
its existence presents and unjustifiable concentration of power and possible
secrecy

The Outlands

While all upon the Shell of Moh, and within the Great
Waste Wall, exists under Xinu rule and Xinu Law, there are some parts which are
of-Moh, but not within the Law.

Left Claw

This claw is the site of the embassies from other Nation-Beasts,
inter-beast traders and other relatively-civilised, or at least not maniacal,
organisations.

Here is 'Claw City' a precarious largely tent-based
semi-city where there is at least some 'claw law' created by agreements between
the various agencies.

The place is not hugely populated and houses many
escaped, expatriate, expelled or un-educatable Xinu. These can vary a great
deal in nature, from relatively normal to the most dangerous, piratical,
brilliant, aggressive, criminal and opportunistic creatures in Zoiterra.

Right Claw

Known as the "Lawless Claw", there are no
large-scale permanent settlements known here, but many ruins. So far as anyone
knows, anything goes on the Lawless Claw.

Any being at all is allowed to attempt to make a living
there, and can even climb Mohs limb and appeal for entry at the (highly
fortified) gate-town. The Lawless Claw is known all over Zoiterra as a hive of
scum and villainy, where even the darkest criminals and conspirators can hide
without fear of detection, worse even than the piratical Ptak Tail States of
Boe.

The Leg-States

Not really worthy of the name "states", these
largely vertical provinces are nothing more than wilderness areas given over to
whatever crawls up them. Defended against by the Great Waste Wall and
occasionally purged by the military and kept open as routes of strategic
opportunity, the Xinu are happy to let the legs be cleansed by occasionally
dipping into the Chaos Sea.

3 comments:

If Love is understood as Equality there cannot be spouses in such setup, as this will theoretically prefer one individual over everybody else? If so, does it mean that the notion of family as we understand it is alien to Xinu?

From the way the settlements are described (with repeating shape and layout) I wonder what would happen to their architecture when Xinu people will discover fractals and endless recursions.